Race talk over. Problem solved

It was an exhausting, draining, demanding experience. And it lasted for more than a week.

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In the 10 days or so since George Zimmerman was acquitted in the killing of Trayvon Martin, all we have heard about is race, race, race.

Which happens to be America’s favorite subject not to talk about.

We talk about race only at moments of crisis, when it cannot be avoided. Otherwise, race is something that, as a nation, we wish we didn’t have to discuss at all. Sort of like the Vietnam War, only more so.

I am talking about white America, of course. For black people and other minorities, race is something they have to confront on a daily basis. But even though we have a black president, that doesn’t mean he wants to lead a national conversation about race. Far from it.

As David Maraniss, The Washington Post associate editor and brilliant biographer, wrote a few days ago, Barack Obama, once having been intensely interested in race, changed after his election to the presidency in 2008.

“Race seemingly became unimportant, if not irrelevant, to the first black president of the United States,” Maraniss wrote. “He rarely spoke about it, only when circumstances pressed him — once when a notable African-American Harvard professor was detained by a cop for forcibly entering his own home after being locked out, and again when a jury found the man who shot Martin not guilty.”

Yet the president spoke movingly and personally about race in an unexpected appearance in the White House briefing room on Friday. In some ways, I liked this talk more than the famous “A More Perfect Union” speech that he delivered in Philadelphia on March 8, 2008, in order to confront and distance himself from the racial comments made by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

That speech came at a time of political crisis. The Zimmerman acquittal was a different kind of crisis. There had been demonstrations, and President Obama could not afford to have them grow into riots. But he also wanted white America to understand what black America was going through post-verdict.